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Posts from the ‘Other blog posts’ Category

Jul 23

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Interesting blog posts (July 23/2009)

ANTHONY TJAN provides Four Simple Ways to Make Your Employees Happier – Help her create a meaningful role, Give feedback, Offer professional development, and Say thank you.

Scott McArthur also discusses happy employees = performing employees.

JOHN BALDONI provides information on How to Make People Passionate About Their Work.

Henrik Mårtensson talks about Performance Evaluations, Business Strategy, and Agile Methodologies which is related to the perception issue I raise in a recent post.

Eric D. Brown provides suggestions to Mind the gap between Strategy and Tactics.

Bret L. Simmons brings up something counter-intuitive in his post – Optimism: Too Much of a Good Thing for Entrepreneurs?

Jun 23

Other interesting blog posts (June 23/2009)

Andy Painter presents the Top 10 tips to make better use of business intelligence . As a spin-off to his blog post, I thought I would associate some Agile practices to help support a better use of BI.

  1. Know what you want to get out of it -> Close collaboration with you business users to properly understand their needs (and be able to deliver on them)
  2. Make it relevant -> Present the results to the business users frequently so they can tie them to the business strategy
  3. Share the knowledge you have -> Increase communication within your development team to share technical and business knowledge and improve the expertise
  4. Start small -> Use an incremental development approach
  5. Work out what you’re already doing -> Do a retrospection of the work done to learn what is working well and what isn’t – what needs to be kept and what needs to be improved
  6. Don’t baffle the users -> Once again, work closely with the business users and frequently present the outcome of your work – avoid surprises
  7. Keep it clean -> Continuous integration testing to ensure quality of the data delivered
  8. Share your knowledge
  9. Open up to others
  10. Keep your eye on use
Ted Malone’s post (Cross-Domain Business Intelligence) re-emphasizes the point that “BI project must be able to adapt to changing requirements” and that “If an organization is rigidly structured, with well-defined “silos” of information, any attempt to develop cross-domain BI will likely end up in several BI silos that ultimately become useless when combined“. To this day, there are still more BI-people interested in architecting and modeling that there are BI-people interested in actually delivering value. It’s a shame.

Jun 19

Other interesting blog posts (June 19/2009)

Mike Cottmeyer asks “are you more concerned about adopting specific agile practices or doing what it takes to build well functioning teams?“. In a world where consulting organizations sell tools and services to help you become Agile, Mike’s underlying question brings to the surface the real reason and the benefits of going Agile. Make sure to focus on the real desired outcome and not on the intermediary steps. The latter will get you “Agile-certified” but will not get you the benefits you are looking for.

Olga Kouzina has an interesting post (Do You Really Need a Deadline?) on a topic I already covered: time boxing software development. Although she raises a good question, I felt she is confusing the need for deadlines (time box) with the inability to properly plan.

Dean Leffingwell added a 5th post on the Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise.

Jun 11

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Other interesting blog posts (June 11/2009)

In Applying the 80-20 rule, Luu Duong presents a good correlation between the law of Pareto (80 – 20 rule) and the prioritization of the backlog.

A good introduction to the concept of Scrum of Scrums.

A somewhat lengthy blog post by Peter Thomas counter-arguing Why Business Intelligence Projects Fail.

Jun 9

Other interesting blog posts (June 9/2009)

Jennifer Hay published an interesting article called Is BI Ready for Agile? in which should takes about the challenges of organizational change management. Despite the limited success of the traditional approach, she asks “Are BI programs prepared to forsake their attachment to processes, documentation, negotiation, and planning” which is a fundamental question before engaging in a new way of doing things. Her point is relevant to every Agile transition – know what you are getting into before you start your transition. Although the results will be positive, you may not be ready for the wavy transition.

Mike Cottmeyer makes an important distinction between the “WHAT” of Agile versus the “WHY”. In his blog called What do you value? he clearly makes a distinction between the tasks and activities usually associated with Agile and the underlying reasons why they work.

A great post about the Product Owner – aka Agile Product Manager by Dean Leffingwell who will be speaking at the upcoming Agile 2009.

Will puts things into perspective in Sprint planning: always focus on the endgame.

In light of the recent Agile artefacts I started documenting, Reza presents some of the Scrum concepts.

Finally, thanks to Rob for the kind words.

Jun 4

Other interesting blog posts (June 4/2009)

Another good article submitted by Alfonso. Death by Architecture shows why 1,000 pages of architecture documents are totally useless.

On a totally different topic, at the Atlassian Summit François attended an inspiring presentation given by John Wood on how “a rising executive at Microsoft took a vacation that changed his life”.  John supported the Room to Read project, an organization whose mission is to “partner with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children’s literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls“.

Jun 2

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Other interesting blog posts (June 2/2009)

Lalit Kale has a semi-humoristic post called Why Your Agile Project Can Not Be A Success.

A colleague from my collaborative text editor project team provided a link about the upcoming Google Wave.

A nice analogy between a hot water tank and software development by Johanna Rothman in her post called: Graceful Degradation is Not What We Want; Quick Failure is Better.

Finally, a practical answer to applying Scrum to BI by Rob.

May 26

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Other interesting blog posts (May 26/2009)

A good post for those who don’t quite get test-driven-development and pair programing, Mike Hill provides counter arguments to demonstrate why TDD and PP both work well in a development environment.

If you are a WordPress user and live around Montreal (Canada), you may be interested in WordPress’ Word Camp Montreal.

I am often asked to suggest books and this is why I made my virtual bookshelf available. Mike Cottmeyer has listed the books he recommends often.

May 21

Other interesting blog posts (May 21/2009)

Is your organization getting good usage from your BI application? Apparently, just over 8 percent of employees are actually using BI tools.

The noise level around Kanban is increasing and Comparing Kanban to Scrum helps better understand the new buzzword.

Another frequently used comparison is between the Product Owner and the Project Manager and the Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise: A Contemporary Framework attemps to clarify the situation.

May 12

Other interesting blog posts (May 12/2009)

In a courageous post, my friend Tremeur highlights that The power of Pair Programming is neglected within his organization. I like people who call a spade a spade and Tremeur took it upon himself to raise a situation he is not comfortable with. Kudos to him.

A stumbled upon an older blog post (The Seven Pillars of BI Success) that presents how 1-800-contact was successful using an Agile approach for their BI project.

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